Lena Dunham Is Building an Empire

For better or worse

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It's Saturday afternoon and a black Mercedes conveying Lena Dunham pulls up a few minutes late in front of a diner in downtown Manhattan. She's alone in the backseat; the chauffeur's in the front. She doesn't get out right away. For a couple minutes she talks on the phone and runs her hand through her hair. She looks agonized — like she's making a decision, like she might be firing someone.

Considering her workload, it's a possibility. She's been in L. A. the last few weeks editing the second season of Girls, her HBO series. The show's creator/writer/director/lead actor, Dunham, twenty-six, has received a remarkable amount of attention from critics who either breathlessly praised it for its honesty about the anxieties of postcollege women or pilloried it for its lack of racial diversity and obsession with Privileged White Girl Problems. She's writing feature scripts, too. And yesterday in New York she met with prospective publishers of a book she started writing.

Dunham is a force right now. She is the emblem of something — it's just that no one's sure what. Of young women? Of young men, too? Of the post–Sex and the City archetypal female friendship? Of privilege? Of New Yorkers? Of the overconfident? Of the self-aware?

"Thank you for meeting me!" she says when she walks in, as if a favor has been done. She says thank you the same way she said it on the red carpet at the Emmys. Or on Chelsea Handler. It's enthusiastic. It's hopeful. It's surprised. It's aggressive. It's enunciated precisely. It doesn't seem phony. She's at ease.

She was probably making dinner plans or something.

Still, she could've been throwing down the gauntlet in that car.

ESQUIRE: I read about Girls for weeks before it actually aired. Do you remember watching that first episode?

LENA DUNHAM: I was home alone with my dog. It didn't feel like it was on TV until I opened Twitter and saw that people were watching. Having that immediate response. What did they do with The Dick Van Dyke Show? How'd you even know what people thought?1

ESQ: But the criticism was just as immediate.

LD: People are ultimately threatened by young people taking positions of power. But there's also this feeling of I could do that, too. People don't feel rabidly jealous of Larry David or Salman Rushdie because they don't think, I could do that. And with what I've done, I think a lot of people think, I could do that in my sleep. If I'd just met one person along my path, I would have that TV show.2

ESQ: Does it get to you?

LD: I kind of get off on it because I had a liberal-arts education and a huge part of that is just like sitting in class with people who are saying, "You know nothing, my godfather died of AIDS!" It's a really self-righteous, annoyed, argumentative world. And I loved it. But I don't wanna engage with people. I think you look crazier when you engage with someone who doesn't have a fully formed argument.3

ESQ: Fine. But the particularly vicious stuff about your weight?

LD: If I was directing this much vitriol at people who hadn't like committed a war crime, I don't know how I'd sleep. Sometimes I think, Boys were mean to me in high school, so I can take whatever. Of course that doesn't mean you can handle five thousand commenters saying you're fat, but it does prepare you for feeling like a weirdo.4

ESQ: Your boyfriend is an asshole, but you seem to like him. I don't mean your character. I mean you, as the writer of the script.

LD: I have no desire to Andrea Dworkin — style vilify male characters that I write. I want them to be just as complex and relatable and lovely as the girls. It's important to me that even if the show is from the female point of view that we're able to imagine how frustrating it must be to be those guys. It's essential to me.5

ESQ: You wrote an essay remembering Nora Ephron. Are you striving for a similar career?

LD: I admired her so much, but I imagined she lived on the hundredth floor of a beautiful building uptown where no one could ever reach her. And you hear these stories about her being kind of tough and scaring the bejesus out of people, and those stories made her even cooler, because she was able to make so many people feel happy, at home, and welcome but also able to make crew guys cower in their boots and get what she needed to get done, done.

ESQ: But is the breadth of her career — movies, books, plays, articles — the model?

LD: Big time.6

ESQ: Girls got five Emmy nominations, which are Ephronesque numbers. How was it?

LD: Surreal. First thing, you don't have any food or water for four hours, which to me is a really long time. The whole thing lasts like six hours, so by the end I would have eaten the cast of Revenge. I was doing so much rubbernecking. I met Louis C. K., who's just like my favorite TV human. Oh, he's the best.7

Dunham would sit for another interview the next day onstage at the New Yorker Festival. The audience was almost all white, made up of people in their twenties and thirties, and about evenly split between men and women. She hit back at fashion bloggers who made fun of an outfit she wore. ("I am going to live to be 105, and I am going to show my thighs every day till I die.") She talked about the growth of the characters on the show. She talked about her directing process. She was witty and incisive. At the end, with about five minutes left, during audience-question time, a woman who said she was twenty-two asked this question in a timid voice: "When I watched the first couple episodes, I was like, This really cornered my psyche. But then as the show progressed, I did feel like it disappointed me in some of the ways... I've never been invited to a rave in Bushwick.... So what are you setting out to do with the show if not to portray my life?"

The audience laughed, but Dunham didn't. She argued that at various points all of our lives deviate from the normal and toward the extraordinary. She said that she wanted to "make something that's real," but she also wanted to make "something that feels big." She responded efficiently, like someone who's said this a thousand times already and will be saying it again and again for a long time.

1. In New York magazine, before Girls aired, Emily Nussbaum wrote: "When a TV critic reports on a new show... one shouldn't go native. One should probably also talk in the third person. In this case, however, I'll have to make an exception. Because from the moment I saw the pilot of Girls, I was a goner, a convert."

2. That one person is Judd Apatow, who is a producer on Girls and gives notes to Dunham on every episode.

3. There are three strains of criticism about Dunham: 1. Her work is too white and too privileged. 2. The lead actors on Girls are all daughters of notable people. 3. Lena Dunham doesn't look all that great naked. If you are a defender of Dunham's, the responses are: 1. Possibly, but Jesus Christ. 2. There's Zosia Mamet, daughter of David. Allison Williams, daughter of Brian. Jemima Kirke, daughter of, uh, Simon... who is the drummer for Bad Company. And Lena Dunham, daughter of Laurie Simmons, an artist and photographer. So, two out of four. 3. If that's the criticism, then you're looking at her through the wrong prism.

4. Dunham is nude multiple times on Girls — during sex, while hanging out on the sofa. In one scene, her boyfriend grabs her belly fat. She's appeared nude in most of her work, going back to the earliest short films that she produced while a student at Oberlin (a few of which are available on YouTube). She told Nussbaum: "Sometimes I'm like, Ugh, how did I make myself the guinea pig for this? But on the other hand, hating my body has not been my cross to bear in this life. Which I feel very lucky about."

5. The boyfriend is played by Adam Driver. He's almost always shirtless. He's an actor. And he treats Dunham's character, Hannah, like shit — he mocks her weight, he all of a sudden pisses on her in the shower. By the end of season one, he's begun to redeem himself, but he has a ways to go.

6. The day before this interview, she met with several publishers about her prospective memoir/advice book. The bidding reportedly started at $1 million. By Monday morning Random House agreed to pay more than $3.5 million.

7. She once dressed up as Louis C. K. for Halloween. He gave her a hug during a commercial break at the Emmys and told her, "What you're doing is important."